Best Prop Firms Trading Rules 2025 – Drawdown, Leverage, Payouts

FTMO

• Prohibited for funded traders (Non-swing accounts).
• Allowed for swing accounts.
• Allowed during Evaluation.

the5ers

• Allowed.

• You must open at least one trade every 30 days to prevent account termination due to inactivity.
• Alternatively, you can request to freeze your account for 7 days to 6 months to avoid termination.

• Holding trades over the weekend is prohibited for funded traders (Non-swing accounts).

• 400k max capital per strategy per person.
• Accounts with identical trading strategies exceeding $400,000 allocated capital may be suspended.

• Your account must not be traded by any third party.

• Opening significantly larger/smaller position sizes or substantially different numbers of positions compared to other trades is prohibited.

• Provider reserves the right to determine at its discretion if certain trades, practices, strategies, or situations are considered forbidden trading.

• Opening multiple profile accounts is prohibited.

• Allowed.

• 4 days.

• Hyper-Growth and Bootcamp: News trading is allowed except for bracket strategies around news.
• High Stakes: Executing orders 2 minutes before until 2 minutes after high-impact news is prohibited.

Topstep

• Allowed for High Stakes and Hyper-Growth with limitations.
• Once a trader has more than $500K under management, taking the same trades across accounts is no longer possible.
• Copy trading from an external account is allowed only if the account belongs to the same trader.
• Third-party copy trading is not allowed.

• Requires a minimum of 3 profitable days.
• A profitable day is a day where closed positions generate at least 0.5% of the initial balance.

• Stop-loss (SL) is required for all positions and orders.
• SL in any position must not risk more than 2% of the account balance.
• 3% daily pause ("soft breach") applies during the funded stage.
• Opening a position without an SL order or exceeding the 2% risk limit is a risk violation.

• One-sided bets: Taking consistent positions in a single direction without considering market conditions or analysis.
• Exploitation of price discrepancies (arbitrage).
• Trading bracket strategies by placing pending orders around high-impact news.
• Exploiting system errors, such as price display inaccuracies or update delays.

• Accounts without new orders for more than 30 consecutive calendar days will expire.

• Allowed as long as they comply with the terms and conditions.

• Allowed with no restrictions during Evaluation and Funded stages.

Earn2Trade

• Express Funded Accounts must execute at least one trade every 30 days to remain open.

• Allowed with no restrictions.

• Only on Combine Accounts, profits must not exceed 50% of the total profit target.

• After a payout, the remaining capital in the account becomes the maximum allowable loss.
• The maximum loss limit will always be set to $0 after payout.

• Allowed.

City Traders Imperium

• Not allowed.

• Accounts will be affected after 5 consecutive trading days of inactivity.

• Allowed.

• 10 days.

• All positions and working orders must be closed by 3:50 PM CT until 5:00 PM CT.

• Over the course of the Evaluation (Challenge phase), no single trading day can exceed 30% or more of your total PnL.

• Trading in a manner that does not align with actual market practices in the relevant futures markets or could potentially cause financial or other harm to Earn2Trade is prohibited.

• Executing an unrealistic number of contracts in a single day is prohibited.

• The maximum withdrawal from a LiveSim account obtained after any size Gauntlet Mini™ evaluation is $4,000.
• To withdraw the full $4,000, the trader must reach a profit of $5,000 (the prop firm deducts 20%).

• Allowed.

E8 Markets

• Yes, but proof of the trading account being copied from must be provided.

• 30 days.

• Allowed, you can use personally developed EAs on funded accounts but must submit the source code for verification.
• Third-party or exploitative EAs are prohibited.

• Challenge Programs (1 and 2 steps): Requires at least 3 Profitable Days, each with a profit of 0.5% or greater.
• Instant Funding and Instant Funding Pro: No minimum number of Profitable Days is required.

• Risk department may enforce temporary measures like leverage limits or position size restrictions.
• Applies to: Multiple account blowouts, limited trading history, deviations from trading patterns, frequent risk violations, excessive drawdowns, or high-risk exposure in volatile markets.

• Stop-Loss: Must be placed within 1 minute of opening a trade (soft breach if missed).
• News Bracketing: Prohibited around high-impact events.
• Gambling Rule: Banned - excessively risky trades or maxing leverage to pass quickly.
• Account Churning: Multiple accounts traded with high risk to hit targets is prohibited.
• Multi-Account Reversal: Opposite positions across accounts (hedging/manipulation) is prohibited.
• Instant Funding program: The first reward can be requested after achieving 5 profitable trading days and a minimum of 2% net profit of the initial balance.

• Challenge Programs: At least 3 profitable days, each with a minimum of 0.5% profit.
• Instant Funding: No minimum profitable day requirement.

• Trading is limited to 2 devices (PC and mobile).
• Additional device use requires approval with proof via video call.
• Unauthorized device use results in account termination without a refund.

• Evaluations phase: No limits.
• 1-Step & 2-Step funded account: Max 2 x $100K or smaller equivalents.
• Instant Funding: Max 1 x $80K or smaller equivalents.
• Instant Funding Pro: Max 1 x $160K or smaller equivalents.

• Evaluation accounts: Allowed.
• Funded accounts: Not allowed within 5 minutes before or after high-impact news.

FunderPro

• Allowed. Traders can copy trades from or to their personal account, another account, or between multiple E8 Trader accounts, including between an E8 Trader account and an evaluation account.
• Restriction: Traders cannot copy trades (or use the same trading ideas) between multiple E8 evaluation accounts. Each evaluation must be done independently.

• After 90 days of inactivity, the account is disabled, and there is no entitlement to a refund.

• Allowed.
• Traders can use any EA as long as multiple users are not executing the same trades/strategy.
• Each user must use their own programmed EA. If multiple users utilize the same EA, it may lead to account termination.

• E8 Classic, E8 Track, E8 Track1:1, E8 One: 1 day.

• Risking your entire account balance on a single trade is not permitted.
• Excessively risky trading styles violate terms and will result in account termination with a full refund.
• E8 reserves the right to de-risk trading strategies by limiting risk exposure to no more than 2% per trade idea or time horizon if prohibited practices are detected.

• 50 lots per order for FX & commodities.
• 100 lots per order for indices.

• Each trading evaluation must be completed independently.

• 2000 modifications of TP/SL and orders per day.
• The maximum position limit per day is also 2000.

• Hedging across multiple accounts, even those belonging to the same trader, is strictly prohibited.

• In the evaluation phase, copying trades manually or via EAs from one account to another, including from a master account to an evaluation account, is prohibited.

• You cannot hold more than 50% of your trades for under one minute.

• All Accounts (except 3-step accounts): Default payout method.
• E8 One & Classic: No single day >40% of total profit.
• Net profit >50% of daily drawdown.

• Daily loss limit is now calculated based on the start-of-day balance. Intraday equity fluctuations no longer affect the limit. Profits increase the next day's risk cap; losses reduce it. This applies only to daily drawdown. Max drawdown remains equity-based.

FundedNext

• Allowed: Stellar, Stellar Lite, and Evaluation accounts.
• Not allowed: Express accounts within 5 minutes before or after high-impact news.

The Trading Pit

• Copy Trading is allowed between FN challenge accounts only and not on a funded account phase.
• Total capital across all copy trading accounts must not exceed $300K.
• The use of cloud-based third-party copier services like Social Trader Tools, Traders Connect, and Duplikum is prohibited.

• To avoid the account inactivity period, traders can simply login to their account at least once or execute a single trade within a period of 35 consecutive days.

• EA's are allowed, only works on MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5.
• EA must be customized to suit your trading style, Identical trades across accounts are not allowed.
• Switching between EA and manual trading is not allowed.

• Evaluation, Stellar Lite, and Stellar 2-Step Challenges: Require a minimum of 5 trading days.
• Stellar 1-Step Challenge: Requires a minimum of 2 trading days.
• Express Account: Requires a minimum of 10 trading days, applicable to both the Challenge and FundedNext accounts.
• For FundedNext Accounts, there is no minimum trading day requirement for Evaluation, Stellar Lite, Stellar 1-Step, and Stellar 2-Step challenges.

• CFDs and Futures Classic: Trading is prohibited 2 minutes before and after high-impact news events.
• Futures Prime: News trading is allowed.

Alpha Capital Group

• CFDs: Copy trading between a trader's own accounts is prohibited.
• Futures: Traders may copy trades manually or automatically in up to 5 accounts.
• Copying trades between Challenge & Earning accounts is prohibited.
• Copy trading from a personal external account to TTP accounts is allowed.
• Copying trades from other traders or external sources is prohibited.

• If no trade is placed for 21 consecutive days, the account will be considered inactive and suspended.

• Allowed as long as they do not engage in prohibited trading activities stated in the terms and conditions.

• Traders must achieve at least 40% of the profit target to meet consistency requirements.

• Traders must maintain consistent lot sizes to demonstrate disciplined and strategic trading practices.

• Trades must be kept open for at least 1 minute.

• Strategies that exploit system errors or trade using external/slow data feeds are prohibited.

• Allowed only for Swing accounts.
• If a trade is initiated within 2 minutes before or up to 2 minutes after a news release (a 4-minute window), its duration must exceed 2 minutes for the trade to be valid.
• For Alpha Pro accounts, trading around high-impact news is restricted to 2 minutes before or after the news release.
• For Alpha One and Alpha Three accounts, trading around high-impact news is restricted to 5 minutes before or after the news release.
• News trading is allowed in all evaluation programs without any restriction.

Audacity Capital

• All accounts will be deactivated after 30 days of inactivity.
• To avoid deactivation, log in and maintain an active connection.
• Once deactivated, accounts cannot be restored.

• All or nothing practices are prohibited.

• Traders must ensure that the average duration of all their trades exceeds 2 minutes.
• At least 50% of the requested profit must come from trades that exceed 2 minutes.

• Entering multiple orders in a short period of time is prohibited.

• If your 6% trailing Max Drawdown resets to the initial balance after reaching a 6% profit, maintain a profit buffer to keep trading.
• Withdrawing all profits will result in account closure.

• Consistently losing or risking 3.5-5% in a single trade or sequence of trades closed around the same time is prohibited.

• Traders in the Funded Trader Program cannot hold positions during major news events, including Non-Farm Payroll, interest rate decisions, and central bank speeches.
• Trading can resume 30 minutes after the event.

Blue Guardian

• Failure to engage in trading activity on a funded account for a consecutive one-month period will result in account termination due to inactivity.

• Traders must demonstrate consistency in trade length and lot size to meet the minimum trading days required for specific programs.
• Example: Opening one position of 15 lots on one day and then six positions of 0.1 lot on six separate trading days will result in failing the Ability Challenge.

• Traders must maintain a score above 70 to be considered consistent.
• Scores between 50 and 70 will prompt a risk team review to determine if trading should continue until the score exceeds 70.
• If the score is below 50, trading must continue until it rises above 50.
• Traders who meet the profit target but not the consistency score must keep trading until they reach the required score.

• Traders are allowed to trade major and minor cross pairs.
• Trading exotic pairs is not permitted.
• Full list of allowed pairs: Google Spreadsheet.
• Trading any pair outside the allowed list constitutes a breach.

• DCA, where traders add positions as a trade moves against them, is strictly prohibited.

• Funded Trader Program only.

• Allowed with restriction: 5 minutes prior to and after high-impact news.
• News trading is allowed in all evaluation programs without any restriction.

Finotive Funding

• Trade copier EAs are not allowed.
• Utilizing one strategy to pass an assessment and then switching to a different strategy in a funded account is prohibited.

• All accounts will be deactivated after 30 days of inactivity.

• All or nothing trading practices are prohibited.

• If your 6% trailing Max Drawdown resets to the initial balance after reaching a 6% profit, you must maintain a 1% profit buffer to continue trading.
• Withdrawing all profits will result in account closure.

• Risking 3-4% on a single trade with excessive margin and no stop-loss is against the rules.
• Excessive risk-taking exacerbated by news events is prohibited.
• A "Boom or Bust" approach where success relies on a single trade or a series of trades linked to a major news event is not allowed.

• A 20% Daily Consistency Rule applies.
• You cannot request a payout until your highest profit trading day is below 20% of total profits made in that period.

• No single trading day can contribute more than 50% of total profits.

• Yes, but News Straddling is Prohibited.

• Allowed.
• You can use external copy trading tools to connect your Finotive account with your personal accounts.
• Copying trades between Finotive accounts of other users is prohibited.

• 30 days.

• Allowed, but avoid strategies like news straddling or holding hedged trades during major news events.

• No minimum trading days.

• Instant Accounts: Total risk per day must not exceed 2.5% of the previous day’s balance across all positions.
• Instant Funding Accounts: Risk is capped at 50% of the daily drawdown limit across all open trades.
• Challenge Accounts: No set maximum risk per trade, but sound risk management is strongly advised.
• Pro accounts: The trader must achieve a net profit of 5% every 90-day period when funded.

• Funded traders must continue trading the same instrument categories used in the evaluation phase.
• The asset classes must represent at least 10% of their total notional trading volume from the Challenge phase.
• This rule prevents traders from gaining access to instruments they haven’t genuinely traded.

• All trades must have a stop loss within 60 seconds.
• Challenge accounts: 3-strike warning system before an automatic stop loss is applied.
• Funded accounts: Automatic stop loss applied after 60 seconds.
• Traders can manually adjust the substitute stop loss.